July 2019 Leisure Learning Courses

July 22 - 26, 2019

Oklahoma State University’s Doel Reed Center for the Arts invites you to a unique educational experience in beautiful Northern New Mexico.

These classes are designed by expert instructors for inquiring adults, and provide hands-on art making opportunities.

July 2019 Courses:

Beginning & Intermediate Flyfishing* | Marc Harrell

Learn or perfect the skills needed for your flyfishing journey - basics of the fly rod and reel, fly casting, pond and stream ecology, matching the hatch (identifying what fly to use when), knot tying, fish identification, ethics, rules and regulations and safety. Then put your skills to the test when you head out to a local pond, lake, or river and do some fishing. Course fee of $700 ($650 Early Enrolment before March 31) includes a supplemental charge for equipment.

Contemporary New Mexico Cooking | Carol Moder

Chile, corn, chocolate. In this hands-on cooking class, we will experience the ways that contemporary New Mexico cooks transform their culinary creations by incorporating traditional New Mexico ingredients into contemporary dishes.

Drawing Canyon, Sage & Sky | Sara Schneckloth

Where do we find inspiration? How do we turn that inspiration into original artwork? In this workshop, we will handcraft art materials and use them to connect to the sense of wonder inspired by the high desert. Participants will learn traditional methods to handcraft their own drawing with charcoal, pastels and watercolor paint, and use these tools to create drawings that reflect the colors, forms, and flavors of Taos, New Mexico.

Hollywood's Southwest | Jeff Menne

New Mexico has been a site of film production since the very dawn of cinema, starting with “Indian Day School,” which was shot at Isleta Pueblo in 1897. Since then Hollywood has been attracted to the state’s landscape, largely as an authentic setting for one of the industry’s most popular genres, the Western. In this course, we will view clips and full-length movies and television shows. We will consider the value that New Mexico has held for Hollywood and what the landscape has meant within our national story. We will also get a firsthand look at the production facilities at Bonanza Creek Ranch.

The Nuclear Bomb & the Land of Enchantment | Ed Walkiewicz

We’ll begin with the history of the Manhattan Project and a few brief writings by some of the physicists who made The Bomb possible. We’ll then go on to compare Western, technological approaches to the natural world with alternative perspectives that also have shaped New Mexico’s history and cultures, including Native American, “counterculture,” and “green” world views. In addition to discussing some short germane texts, participants will visit Los Alamos and tour the Earthship community and other relevant area locations, such as Taos Pueblo and the New Buffalo Center site of what was once the largest commune in the country.

New Mexico Native Plant Ecology | Sylvia Rains Dennis

The natural biodiversity of the Taos region offers a stunning array of native plants, their pollinators, and wildlife throughout mountain and plateau/canyon life zones. We will begin our discovery of botany with a basic overview of natural habitats and sustainability, then explore field locations that emphasize our unique mosaic of wildflowers, forests, bunchgrass/steppe and wetland/riparian vegetation. We will discuss what we find while learning basic plant identification techniques and creating site descriptions, keeping in mind the example of people living sustainably within these landscapes for many centuries.